


The Yank

by Sheffield



Series: Young Sandburg [2]
Category: The Professionals, The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-19
Updated: 2012-06-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 03:00:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/438398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London 1979: Blair Sandburg is a ten year old witness in a terrorist trial.  Who is Naomi's new friend whom they go to stay with in Stratford on Avon afterwards?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Yank

London 1979: The Old Bailey

It was weird how soon you got used to stuff. Ten year old Blair  
Sandburg had been looking at seven fat men in white powdered wigs for a week now and it had almost started to look normal to him. He pushed his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose again and wished, for the thousandth time, that they were held together with something better than a band-aid.

"Master Sandburg? If I could have your attention for a moment?"  
"Sir?"  
It was the fat one called Sir Peter again. He was the worst. Kept making stupid kissy-faces at the judge and trying to make it sound like everyone else was telling lies all the time. Blair didn't lie. He might ob-something once in a while, like Naomi said, but he didn't lie.

"Can you remind me again: how old are you exactly, please?"  
"Ten years," Blair said immediately, and then, thinking about it, "Five months and... four days. Sir." Well, he HAD said 'exactly'. A ripple of something went round the court room and Blair wondered whether he should have said that. Don't be cheeky, everyone had warned him. Be polite and clear and call everyone sir, especially the jerks. It was tougher, being a witness, than it looked on TV.  
"Do you know what a lie is, Blair?"  
"Yes sir."

It wasn't all bad. There was a man with a stupid wig who was on his - Blair's - side, too. His name was Saunders and he'd told Blair to speak up and tell the truth, but not to volunteer anything. He hadn't offered to explain what volunteer meant, and had treated Blair as if he understood. It had been the best thing that had happened to him all week.

"Well, Master Sandburg?"  
"Well what, sir?"

Something good has to come from being slightly small for your age. Blair might have to stand on a box to see over the wooden rail around the witness box, but he could also do dumb insolence, with or without added puppy dog eyes, like nobody's business. He smiled sweetly at Sir Peter and looked as innocent as could be.

"Well, would you mind explaining to us what you understand the word 'lie' to mean, please?"  
"Objection. Relevance?"  
"Goes to credibility of the witness, my lord."  
"All right, I'll allow it."  
"I'm obliged to you m'lud. Now, Master Sandburg. What do you understand by the term 'lie'"  
"Lie. Noun. An untruth. Lie. Verb. The act of telling an untruth or, alternative meaning, to position oneself horizontally as on a bed. Sir."  
Blair pushed his glasses up his nose again, taking advantage of the brief second when his hand covered his face to let his grin out, but then instantly blanked his face once more. Was it time to bring out the big puppy-dog eyes?

"Thank you Master Sandburg. I see. And, since you have such a clear understanding of what it means to lie, can you help us by explaining what it means to lie under oath?"  
"That would be perjury, sir. Which is a crime, as well as being wrong."  
Now was the time for the puppy dog eyes.  
"Oh? You think there's a difference between something being wrong and its being a crime?"  
"Yes sir. 'Wrong' is a moral concept, 'crime' a legal one. The two are often but not necessarily congruent."

This time Blair could see all the other men in wigs smiling, as well as the judge, so he thought they might get to the point soon.

"Very well then, Master Sandburg. Let's go over your testimony just one more time, shall we? Now, you say you saw my clients - that's the man and woman in the box over there - leaving a parcel in the hotel on the morning of the 24th, is that right?"  
"Yes sir."  
Blair had already so testified three times but "his" barrister had warned him not to let Sir Peter make him get mad. He kept his face set on his best 'charm little old ladies' expression and fixed Sir Peter with his big, blue eyes.  
"Very interesting. But we've already heard from other witnesses that there was a bomb in that parcel in the hotel entrance later that day. So you see my problem, Master Sandburg?"  
"No sir."  
"Well, if you're right, then my clients must be the bombers who blew up the hotel and killed several innocent people, and yet in fact my clients are just innocent tourists visiting this country - much like yourself, in fact."

There was no question in there. Blair had already picked up enough of the rules of this stupid game to know that he wasn't supposed to say anything until someone asked him a question. It was like "Simon says"; the stupid man was just trying to catch him out by luring him into speaking when it wasn't his turn. Blair gave the barrister his most steadfast gaze and remained silent.

"Well?"  
"Well what, sir?"  
"Well, do you think there is any possibility you might be mistaken? That a small boy in a strange country might have decided - seeing a big fuss and excitement - to make himself seem important by claiming to see something he hadn't?"  
Blair suppressed a smile.  
"As to the first question, sir, there is of course always the possibility that anyone might make a mistake or be misled, like when you watch a magician at a circus and he specifically sets out to mislead your gaze so you don't see what you think you see. But in this case unless your clients were deliberately trying to make me see something that wasn't there, then no, there is no possibility I am mistaken. I saw them from about as far away as you are now, I was wearing my glasses and saw both the man and the woman clearly and distinctly, it was bright sunlight at the time with excellent visibility. I recognise their faces because they are the ones that did it, but also because I was reading a Sherlock Holmes book the day before the bombing so I was pretending to be a junior detective at the time and taking very careful notes of my surroundings and the people that I saw. And-" He drove on, overriding the barrister's attempt to interrupt, "And I'm not a tourist, I'm a traveller; I don't want to be here, we were supposed to be on a retreat in Nepal this week but the US Embassy asked us to stay here a few weeks longer so that I could testify. Oh, and I don't think being a witness here makes me important. It just makes me a target."

The case was more or less over with that.

When they had finished with him he was ushered out to where Naomi was waiting. But there was a guy with her. Uh ho. All of Blair's defences sprang up; what would this one be like?  
"Sweetie? This is Ray, a friend of mine."  
Ray put out his hand and Blair took it gingerly. "Sir," he acknowledged.  
"Call me Ray, please. And can I call you Blair? I hear you did a good job in there. Got the bad guys on the run." Blair gave him a small smile. Maybe this one would be OK. His hand was warm and dry and his handshake firm but not crushing, and he looked Blair in the eye, acknowledging him as a person and not dismissing him as an encumbrance to Naomi. Not a bad score to begin with, for one of Naomi's 'friends'.  
"We're going to stay with Ray for a couple of days, sweetie. He's got a little house near Stratford: isn't that exciting? We can go to the theatre, see some Shakespeare where the bard actually lived. And there are some ley lines that pass through the area which are really fascinating..."  
"Aw mom! I thought we were going to Nepal as soon as the trial was over?"  
"Well yes, that was the plan. But let's be flexible, shall we? It's important to be open to new experiences. I'm sure the universe intended us nothing but good by introducing us to Ray right now."

If Blair Sandburg sometimes suspected that the universe had a warped and twisted sense of humour, he kept it very much to himself.

#

Stratford on Avon, England, 1979

"What's going on, Ray?"

He chose his ground very carefully for the confrontation. He cornered Ray in the kitchen of the "nice little house near Stratford" – which turned out to be a faceless semi in the middle of an estate of a billion others - and it had taken Blair less than ten minutes of observation to conclude that Naomi's Ray was no more a resident of the house than he, Blair, was himself. He didn't remember which door led to which room, he didn't know how many bedrooms there were till he looked, and he couldn't find the simplest things, like the kettle which Blair well knew was every Englishman's lifeline.  
Ray grinned. "Can't fool you, eh? We're in a safe house, Blair, that's all."  
"Are you a policeman?"  
Ray produced an identity card and held it out for Blair to take, read, examine thoroughly. "CI5," Ray said. "Sorry. My boss thought you and your mum might need someone to keep an eye on you for a few days, just in case."

Blair's heart had started to beat fast. Were they in danger? Should he have kept his big mouth shut? Had he endangered Naomi by agreeing to bear witness?

"But the terrorists - they're in jail, aren't they?"  
"They are, yes. Don't worry about them. But they have friends, and you're Americans, so we thought it might occur to their friends that they could make an even bigger splash if they went after an American kid. Get themselves on the telly."

Blair understood at once, and cursed himself for not thinking of it in the first place. He was a kid, and the newspapers loved stories about heroic kids doing stuff. He'd seen himself in the papers while the trial was going on, seen it exactly once before Naomi had snatched the paper and forbidden him to muddy his aura with such nonsense. And now if the bombers killed him, they'd get tons and tons of publicity – which didn't really matter if you didn't read it, except that it meant Naomi would be in their line of fire!

"Dumb, Blair; dumb!" he told himself ruefully. Then another thought occurred to him. "You're using us, aren't you?" Ray said nothing, but Blair could tell, straight away, that he'd hit a nerve. "I'm right, aren't I? Instead of letting us go straight off to Nepal - where we might quietly disappear if the terrorists really wanted us dead - you've kept us here so that they *will* go after us, so you can get them. Yes?"

Ray looked him steadily in the eye. "I won't lie to you, Blair. That's probably what my boss had in mind when he asked me to keep an eye on you both for a few days. But no-one's keeping you here against your will. All I did was invite Naomi; she was the one who made the decision."

Blair had seen The Godfather. "You 'made her an offer she couldn't refuse'" he deadpanned. Ray grinned and made no reply, but carried on checking the house thoroughly, looking at its exterior locks and sightlines. Only now he didn't suggest Blair went back to help Naomi with her feng shui of the living room but treated him as a colleague, showed him some of the house's features.

"See this?" he said, pointing. Blair looked, but all he could see was one of those nasty two bar electric fires fitted into the wall where there ought to have been a fire. He looked more closely. Yes, that was right, the fire was set into a wall, but there were recessed bookshelves either side which meant alcoves, which meant this was a real, functioning chimney, for a real fire, just blocked off by the ugly electric one.

Ray waggled his eyebrows and then pulled, very gently, at the top of the fire - and it swung out, away from the wall, revealing the original fireplace behind it.

Only, when Blair looked a little closer, he realised it wasn't a fireplace at all, or at least not just a fireplace. There were two metal rods fixed to the wall, and when Blair scrunched down and looked up, inside the chimney, he could see it was actually a metal ladder, fixed firmly into the outer wall with metal clamps.

Blair stood up. "An escape hatch!" he realised. Ray grinned conspiratorially at him. "Let's just keep this as our secret," he said. "If something bad happens, this is your escape route. You saw how I pulled out the fire?" Blair nodded, round eyed. "You try it," Ray said, so Blair waited while Ray put everything back as it had been, and then gently pulled the fire forward by himself and then cautiously ducked down and stepped into the chimney space itself.

"That's good," Ray said. "Look, if you hear shooting or there's an explosion, something dramatic like that, or you think there's someone in the house that isn't me or Naomi, then I want you to come here and get into the chimney like this. I'll show you in a minute how to pull it shut behind you."

"Where does the ladder go?" Blair asked, swallowing nervously.  
"That's what I'm going to find out," Ray said cheerfully. "Wait here for a minute."

Ray disappeared into the chimney, his denim-clad legs showing for a moment as he made his way onto the ladder, and then disappearing altogether up into the chimney. Blair watched, round-eyed, and then saw the denim legs reappear followed quickly by the rest of him, and then Ray was standing on the rug next to Blair, shaking dust out of his curly hair

"It's OK, Blair. It goes into the roof space and then there are some planks put down between the rafters to make a walkway. You walk along that, and then someone's made a hole between this house and the one next door, just covered over by a bit of tarpaulin. You get into the next door house, pull the tarpaulin back down, and you'll both be safe. If you have to, you can go down the loft ladder into the next door house and then get them to call the police, but if I were you I'd just stay quietly in next door's loft till Bodie or I come and tell you it's safe.

"Who's Bodie?" Blair asked.  
"Me!" came a cheerful voice, and Blair turned round to see a big man in a sharp suit coming in through the chimney behind Ray. "You must be Blair," he said, holding out his hand. "I'm Bodie, this guy's partner. Pleased to meet you, Blair. I was just checking the roof access from next door when this fella' appeared like Father Christmas. Gave me the fright of my life, he did. Oh hell!" Then Bodie clapped his hand over his mouth theatrically. He beckoned Blair closer and stage whispered,  
"Your mum doesn't still believe in Father Christmas, does she?"

Blair laughed so hard he nearly fell over.

#

Stratford wasn't bad, actually. It wasn't Nepal, sure, but the river was pretty and he enjoyed going to the theatre, both with Naomi and without her. Best of all was one afternoon when they had gone to the small studio theatre and found there was only one ticket left. Naomi had immediately bought it and given it to Blair and gone off to look at ley lines for the afternoon. And so he had spent a glorious afternoon at a production of Macbeth where all the actors sat in a circle around the performance space and Blair had found himself sitting between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth for some of the time, and he had looked up their names in the programme and then afterwards, after his blood had been chilled and he had laughed and cried and stood on his chair to applaud at the end, afterwards Ian McKellen and Judi Dench had taken him backstage and showed him round the dressing rooms and let him smell the greasepaint and finally understand that old saying about "the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd"

Ray had been waiting for him at the entrance afterwards and he had explained his dilemma - Naomi didn't allow him to go off with people on his own, but the actors had invited him to come for a lemonade with them afterwards, so Ray went with him to a "pub" up the road, and they sat decorously and legally outside and he drank lemonade and ate "crisps" - potato chips - while Ray and Ian and Judi and the others drank warm English beer.

And if he woke in the night, wondering what the strange sounds of the house were, well, he was used to that.

So the day the terrorists came was the one where he'd started to relax and forget about them. He was showing Ray how you cook biscuits (Bodie thought they were making cookies, because that was what the word meant in England) when there was a noise - crack - and suddenly Ray was yelling at him "Go! Out the secret passage. GO!" and Ray had a gun and he was pushing him and where was Naomi and there were people in the hallway and Ray pushed him down and BAM! First he was hot, and then he was cold.

Then it was all quiet for a minute.

Then Blair realised that the 'hot' was a splash of blood. Bodie had come in the door behind the bad guys as they'd broken down the door, and he'd shot the one with the gun before he'd brought it up to point at Blair, and it had missed him, everything had missed him, except the blood which had splashed across his face and his chest.

He looked down and he saw that the other one - the one that Ray had hit, he reconstructed - had wet himself all over the floor and when Ray had pushed him down out of the way he must have put his hand into the puddle. And that must have been the 'cold'

He turned away from it all for a moment, back towards the kitchen, and was miserably and copiously sick all over the floor.

"BLAIR!"

Naomi came running down the stairs, snatched him up as if he were still a baby, and carried him up the stairs with her before he could say anything, protest, anything.

She dumped him on the bathroom floor and started to strip his clothes off, wouldn't give him a second to explain that he was all right, really, and none of the horrible things on him had come out of him, honest, well, except the sick, but that was just because it was...

He was sick again, but this time me made it to the toilet.

Naomi dumped him into the tub and started scrubbing at him with a special sponge she had brought with her from the ashram last year and she poured about ten dollars-worth of sage and cinnamon leaf and frankincense into the tub with him and started to scrub him - hard! - with some oatmeal soap.

"It's all right sweetie, it won't stain your aura, we'll see to that, it's just a purification oil, that's right, lift your arm, good boy. We'll go to Nepal, now, tonight, forget all about it, no need for us to hang around here any longer. Detach with love, that's right. I'm sure Ian and Judi will understand, although it would have been nice to have seen Coriolanus but of course cultural development is one thing but you have to cultivate your own garden first. You understand, sweetie, right? That's right. All over now, Sweetie. You must be sleepy. You can sleep on the flight."

I think I'm in shock, Naomi, he thought piercingly. But it was too hard to say anything, so he let her hand him the toothbrush, already laden with cinnamon and mint paste, and brushed and brushed and brushed, as she directed.

#

Half an hour later, still slightly damp and a little subdued, Blair was sipping a milky chocolate drink from a thermos Naomi had improbably produced from her backpack while Ray drove them to the airport.

"You all right, Blair?" Ray said quietly.

"I asked you not to bother him with questions,  
Officer," Naomi said sharply. "I hold you responsible for this whole fiasco, you know. If I'd known you were a pi- police officer, and we were being set up as nothing more than sacrificial lambs... Your supervisor will be hearing from our Embassy,"

It wasn't Ray's fault, Blair thought. Ray and Bodie had done what they were supposed to do and either caught or killed all the bad guys and kept him and Naomi safe.

He ran his hand lightly down his chest, then up across his face, unconsciously tracing the path that had been marked by the slash of blood.

I am safe, he thought, not believing it. I am safe, I am safe, I am safe.

But he didn't dare close his eyes.


End file.
